This Week in Matrix 2026-07-03

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Matrix Tutorials #15 – Matrix on Kubernetes

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Was ist Matrix?

David Mehren reports

A few days ago at DO_BYTE, strifel held the talk "Was ist Matrix?", which introduced Matrix and gave an overview of servers, clients and other tools.

You can watch the talk (in German) at https://media.ccc.de/v/do-byte-2026-18-was-ist-matrix

🔗Dept of Stammtische 🍻 (website)

Julis (she/her) announces

A Stammtisch ("regular's table") is a German meetup format where those with a shared interest meet regularly for discussion, exchange, and socialising. Find more community organised events at https://matrix-community.events!

• 8 July 19:00 CEST: #matrix-stammtisch:koeln.ccc.de at C4

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4497: Filter state events by type in /state endpoint
• MSC4496: Calendar Events, Invites, and Availability in Matrix

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4127: Removal of query string auth (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4186: Simplified Sliding Sync

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4418: Make destination a required server authentication field

🔗Spec Updates

Hot off the heels of MSC2545: Image Packs being accepted last week (and merged to the spec this week!), MSC4186: Simplified Sliding Sync was accepted by the SCT on Tuesday!

Note that this is only the core sliding sync MSC: all the extension MSCs are still in review. Sliding Sync won't land in the spec until at least a couple of those are accepted as well (several support E2EE messaging, for instance).

Regardless, SSS is a large pillar of the ongoing Matrix 2.0 work, and something that homeservers and clients already implemented and rely on (Element X), so it's really great to see the huge core MSC land!

Finally, keeping (roughly) with our quarterly release cadence, expect a new Matrix spec release (v1.19) to land very shortly new with lots of exciting changes!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Zendrite

bones_was_here says

Zendrite has made nice progress since the last TWIM post, here's a summary.

3.1.0 has been released and includes a security update for vulnerabilities in the image library used for media thumbnails, for the CVE list please refer to the PR.

🔗Breaking changes in 3.0.0

• auto-forget on leave + tri-state auto-purge #171
• auto-purge empty rooms #160 #162

These features automatically delete old rooms, by default it's done when all local users have forgotten a room, you may also wish to enable auto-forgetting rooms on leave and auto-purging empty rooms.

🔗Other features

• mediastorage: S3-compatible Media Storage #229
• nats: Add NATS authentication and credential rotation support #228
• clientapi: implemented registration tokens #175
• add MatrixRTC transports endpoint (MSC4143) #122

🔗Optimisations

• push required_state filters into SQL to avoid loading all room state #121
• fetch large room state in chunks to prevent OOM during state resolution 2a1a3a8

🔗Bigger fixes

• several fixes to the MSC3706 "faster joins" partial state feature
• panic on malformed federated events (affects Dendrite too, could cause "boot-looping") #216
• when purging a room try to leave cleanly first, and invalidate cache (affects Dendrite too) #158
• allow outgoing federation to use ipv6 by default (affects Dendrite too) #157
• roomserver: apply redactions from privileged creators in v12+ rooms (affects Dendrite too) #151
• syncapi: fix /messages sender/type filtering (affects Dendrite too), important for moderation bots #130

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Migration from Dendrite is straightforward (mainly you need to change the d to a z), see here for full details.

🔗Tuwunel (website)

Enterprise successor to conduwuit, the high-performance and feature-rich fork of Conduit.

june ✿ 🏳️‍⚧️ (it/she/puppy) says

Tuwunel 1.8.0 opens an existing Conduit database directory and migrates it in place. June's migration carries over rooms, media including S3-backed objects, pending knocks, and suspended or locked users, and attributes media to its local owners. It is the largest single capability this cycle, raised by Korvox.

Identity and authentication grew alongside it. MSC2290 third-party-identifier email support arrives with outbound mail, storage, and management endpoints. Matrix Authentication Service support lands too: the provisioning API, synced email bindings, and MSC3824 SSO redirect-action forwarding, opened by CEbbinghaus. dasha-uwu added a remote-server version API and SSLKEYLOGFILE support for debugging federation TLS.

Spec compliance advanced across MSC2666 mutual_rooms, MSC3765 rich-text topics, MSC4133 extended profiles, and MSC4311 invite and knock state as full PDUs, plus an MSC1692 registration terms stage opened by erebion and MSC4190 appservice device management opened by ngophuocloi-miracle-aavn, all tracked in the compliance list.

One fix comes with an apology. A 1.7.x allow-list that omitted the local server name dropped local users' own events as forbidden remote traffic; the local server is now always exempt. Reported by BurningEnlightenment. timestamp_to_event (MSC3030) no longer returns M_NOT_FOUND on valid searches, fixed by lingbohome, and falls back to federation for local misses. Lazy-loaded incremental sync keeps changed members (MSC4222).

Operators upgrading should note: a push gateway on a private or loopback address now needs an ip_range_denylist exception, the RocksDB engine moves to 11.1.1, and the first 1.8.0 boot rebuilds the timestamp index once, slowing first startup.

Full release notes: https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel/blob/55d59989c0af57860a2afdfabf4c210ef66e499c/RELEASE.md

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💕 GitHub ✦ Releases ✦ DockerHub ✦ Playbook ✦ Containers ✦ Documentation 🐕️ Tuwunel 💕

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🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 17+.

Mauro reports

• It’s been a feature requested for such a long time, and finally, user status work has been started.
• Various accessibility issues were fixed, and more are to come.
• We moved search into its own dedicated search tab to reduce cluttering and give a cleaner UX.
• And to stay in the theme of search… we’re also currently working on a feature that allows users to search among all their messages, another long-requested feature that is being worked on.
• The app has been migrated to the new Swift 6.2 version of the language, ensuring that the concurrent code of our app is validated at compile time. This has improved the performance and stability of the app by a lot.
• The ability to create polls that allow for the selection of multiple answers has been added.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats 📊

Aine [etke.cc] says

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 19512 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4163 (21.3%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18150 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 15379 (78.8%)
• continuwuity: 1594 (8.2%)
• conduit: 580 (3.0%)
• dendrite: 316 (1.6%)

Stats timeline is available on 📊 MatrixRooms.info/stats

🧩 Integrations with apps and servers | 💜 Support the project | 👉 How to add your server | 🙅 How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.